It really depends. My home server uses about 120w idle (older series i7 with many disks). It comes out to about $25 a month in electricity.
That’s enough to where you should make sure it’s worth it, and ask yourself if you’re better off with a higher end NUC or even raspberry pi, which use orders of magnitude less power.
(We have solar so I don’t really worry about the power consumption anymore)
Wow what a difference! My laptop shows about 2-3 watt idle (brightness low of course). What a huge difference in power consumption over the years. Do you think that’s mostly the hard disks using the power?
That’s enough to where you should make sure it’s worth it, and ask yourself if you’re better off with a higher end NUC or even raspberry pi, which use orders of magnitude less power.
(We have solar so I don’t really worry about the power consumption anymore)